I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry I was such an asshole.
I’m sorry, too.
I miss you terribly. I can’t wait to come back home.
I miss you, too.
Look, I was thinking, when I get back, we can take a trip up the coast. Monterey, Morro Bay…
That sounds nice, but I wish we could do it now. I wish we’d done it before.
Me, too.
God, I love you, baby.
I love you, too. I know you have to go. Goodb—
No, don’t hang up yet. How are the kids?
Missing you. We all miss the daddy-man. But you have to go now. Because duty calls. And it always will. You have things to do. Important things.
No, wait! Sara! Wait!
I’ll love you forever…
Sara!
He started awake, his hands still shaking. He’d been dreaming. Dreaming about Sara. Her touch, her beautiful eyes, even her slightly crooked smile. He’d screwed it up, and it was no one’s fault but his. It had been time and past time to hang it up and fix things at home. The Teams could take care of themselves for a while. The pain in his throat interrupted his dream and, as he returned to full consciousness, a raging thirst asserted itself, driving all other concerns to the distant background.
His eyes felt like sandpaper. Harry blinked, trying to ease the discomfort. He turned his head, feeling a pillow crinkle under his neck, and the ambient light began to grow.
“Welcome back, Lieutenant,” a warm tenor voice said.
It came from his right side, so he looked that way. First, he saw a small, opaque observation window. As his vision cleared, Harry noted the room included a few television-style monitors and the familiar shapes of medical equipment wrapped in curved beige plastic. He’d been in his share of hospital rooms, usually to check on a teammate who’d earned a bad luck medal. His eyes slowly tracked further, taking in a pair of flight-suited men standing at his bedside.
So, this time, he was the star of the show. Well, shit.
“Helicopter…shot…down?” he managed. “Hospital?”
“Yes,” the taller of the two men replied, picking up a wired remote and pressing the button to slowly raise Harry’s bed to a sitting position. As it smoothly whined upwards, the plain-faced attendant continued. “Your helo was shot down off Somalia. Nearly all of the crew and passengers were recovered. Can you hold this?”
He proffered a white plastic cup, and Harry leaned forward, carefully grasping it with both hands. He noticed in passing that rather than one of those embarrassing ass-less hospital smocks, he was fully dressed. In fact, his shirt sleeve was the same, familiar desert tricolor camo he’d worn in the Mog, right down to the modified pocket he’d asked Sara to sew onto the upper sleeve. After a long sip of cool water from the convenient straw, he leaned back and exhaled.
“Thanks, I really needed that,” he croaked, looking at the speaker. The stranger looked vaguely familiar, though the bulky flight suit didn’t match any American pattern he recognized. The gold oak leaves on the collar points were familiar, as was the Midwestern American accent. “Commander…”
“It’s major, actually.” The sandy haired man smiled. “Rodger Murphy. You and I were on the same Blackhawk. They woke me up a short while ago. We’ve got a bit of a system now, so if you let me give you some background, we can skip past the first ten or so questions. Okay?”
Harry looked at him suspiciously, then gave the room another once over. There were English labels here and there, but otherwise there was no information. No charts, no hospital PA system, not even a call button. Just a coat of gray paint, newly applied, by the smell.
“We?”
“Yes, we,” Murphy replied with a smile and held up one hand. His shorter companion rolled his eyes and passed the major a small blue piece of paper. “I can tell from the squint in your eyes you’re already figuring out this isn’t a regular hospital room, and this isn’t a normal recovery. I’ve been helping wake up paranoid, pissed off, and otherwise uncooperative military personnel for a week or so. Let me give you a basic data dump, then we can proceed to the more interesting questions. Ready?”
This definitely wasn’t normal procedure for bringing someone out of deep sedation or a medically induced coma, Harry realized. This Major Murphy, or whatever his name really was, had it right. Harry surreptitiously flexed his arms and legs. No pain, no restraints.
Murphy’s smile broadened and he held up his hand again. The second man placed another blue chit, grimacing.
“Of course, you could continue like this,” Murphy said, as the second man scowled and folded his arms. “Captain Makarov has made a series of rather unwise wagers and you’re making me plenty of drink chits, those being one of the few forms of currency we have at the moment. And to your unspoken questions: no, you’re not restrained. Yes, you’re medically recovered. Shall we proceed?”
Harry nodded warily, looking at both men. Drink chits? This was not your average reassuring medical speech. Were these guys the opposition? Could the Aideed militia even shop him out to…whoever these guys belonged too?
Harry took another pull on the straw to hide his confusion, but nodded assent. Murphy deferred to the shorter man with a “c’mon” gesture.
“Your vertolet, how you say, ‘copter, was shot down November 17, 1993,” Makarov said with a heavy Slavic accent. Russian? It was a bit more slurred, sounding a bit like their guys who spent too long in the ‘Stans. A Kazakh, maybe? And what the hell was he doing here?
Makarov made direct eye contact with Harry. “We still don’t know who responsible, but the ‘copter carrying you and Major Murphy took two missiles. Crash was pretty spectacular. Killed copilot and crew chief. You were severely injured. You’ve received highly advanced medical treatment, but now only need the usual rest, healthy diet, and exercise. In fact, you’re medically approved for duty. Clear so far?”
How long have I been here? Where’s Sara?
“Have you informed my wife?” Harry asked, overcome with a sudden sense of urgency. Sara would be losing her mind. In fact, he was surprised she wasn’t here right now, knowing how pushy she could be, especially where family was concerned. Singularly unimpressed with military protocol, she’d fight her way to his bedside if she had to. “How long have I been out? Where are we—Frankfurt? San Antonio?”
The expressions on both men changed to something a doctor might wear on the cusp of delivering a fatal prognosis.
Harry began to feel something akin to panic, though he steeled his emotions. What had happened to Sara? The creepy feeling he always got in combat was prickling up his spine.
“Who are you guys?” he demanded. “Who you with? Is this an Agency op? Why the hell am I in my field uniform in a hospital and who the fuck is the Russki?”
Murphy took over, with an apologetic glance at Makarov. “This is where it gets…weird, I’m afraid. Your recovery took a long time. A very long time. The US didn’t recover the survivors. The people who saved your life used an advanced cryogenic technique which preserved your uniform, your equipment, everything. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it. The shoot down was a hundred and thirty-eight years ago. Today’s date, Earth-style, is September 9, 2125.”
Harry just stared at him. Then, involuntarily, started to laugh. It came out of nowhere, and he couldn’t help it. This was the setup for every crappy sci-fi movie he’d ever heard of. He continued for a bit, looking at the men at his bedside. He expected them to get angry. Murphy just looked sad. Makarov managed a stolid indifference.
“What, no more betting?” Harry said sarcastically. “Come on, who do you work for? This is a set up. Time travel isn’t real. Cryogenic tech isn’t real. If you tried to pull a Disney on me, my brain would be torn apart by ice crystals, just like Walt’s. Stop wasting my time and tell me what you want; otherwise, all you get is Tapper, Harold R., Lieutenant, US Navy. 620-11-2129.”
“Like Major said, we’ve been doing this for long
time,” Makarov answered, moving toward the window. “Is easier to show than tell.” He touched a light switch on the window frame, and it blinked into transparency.
Stars were slowly drifting past. Stars against a deep, perfect black. There was a wall of gray and brown rock filling a third of the field of view. As he watched, it slowly moved, no, rotated. Craters and lines were visible. The moon? After a few more moments, he discerned he was looking at one end of a rocky cylinder, immense in size. A construct, reminiscent of NASA’s old Spacelab, was slowly emerging from a shadowed opening at one end of the cylinder. Harry struggled to get a sense for scale. He recognized a human figure in a bulky looking, helmeted coverall, sitting astride a girder that made up part of the vehicle, if that’s what it was. It was a space-suited person, Harry belatedly realized. The entire scene snapped into focus. The rotating cylinder was more than a couple klicks long and half as thick. The decidedly non-aerodynamic ship carefully emerging had an industrial look, covered in a mixture of silver and white panels, some pristine and some stained and scratched. Piping and cableways snaked through trestles.
A solar panel array, recognizable anywhere, slowly swept into view. It was tended by a tiny, delta winged craft, colored white and black. Though it was much further away, Harry realized this ship was the size of a 747 wide-body jet. Harry watched them slowly swing past the window. Then the limb of a planet swam into view, by degrees. It was banded in swirling clouds like Jupiter, but it wasn’t from the Solar System, unless Jupiter had changed colors to include purple and yellow.
He was on a space station.
No. Impossible. His head began to swim, and he shook it hard, before looking back toward the two men.
“This overview is what you SEALs like to call the mission summary—first, you’re aboard a spaceship, the Dornaani cruiser Olsloov,” Murphy said, carefully pronouncing the unfamiliar word. Alls-sluv. “The Dornaani are an allied, non-Terran species who are very advanced. We’re docked next to a space habitat, that moon-looking thing you see out the window. It’s run by another branch of humanity, refugees really. Also, there’s an interstellar war on, and you were recovered from a stolen cache of cryogenically suspended humans, mostly men and mostly military, kidnapped out of conflict zones on Earth starting about two hundred years ago, ending in the early two thousands. The folks who did it are another alien species, the Ktor, and they were using us to do some dirty work they could blame on Earth. The only way we get to go home is to work together, kick Ktor ass, and win this war. The details will take days to absorb. What do you think so far?”
Harry returned to looking out the window. The solar array had rotated out of sight and the swirling surface of the gas giant now spanned the view.
“T-trick,” Harry said, almost stuttering the word. “Some kind of trick. That’s some kind of special effects. One of those new rear-projection big screen televisions. You’re trying to fool me—”
“Well, we’re taught American SEALs are stubborn, selected for it, in fact,” Makarov said, shrugging. “So, reaction is no surprise. Next step we use for tough cases is suit them up for EVA. So far, weightlessness and new planet convince everyone. We need to do this, or can we save some time?”
Harry was staring at the sharply drawn shadow creeping up the curved sweep of the hull plating outside.
This can’t be real.
This can’t be real.
THIS ISN’T REAL.
His thinking brain was trying to pick out flaws in the computer-generated simulation. Meanwhile, his hindbrain was desperately trying to control his rising gorge.
His efforts at rationalization failed first by a narrow margin, and then he vomited over the side of his bed, splashing the shoes of both men.
“Ha!” Harry heard Makarov exclaim, just before Harry’s gut convulsed a second time. “I predict correctly. Give last chit back, Major.”
* * *
Harry had taken over a table in the corner of the refectory serving this quadrant of the habitat. The Lost Soldiers, as the Terrans called themselves, ate together. What their mostly human hosts who ran the station, the SpinDogs, thought about it was a mystery since the two groups didn’t readily mix.
During the mandatory orientation and safety training arranged by the SpinDogs, Harry and a company’s worth of the Lost Soldiers had trooped for hours through myriad passageways, engineering spaces, and general-use compartments and had still only visited a fraction of the station. The visit for his motley group had been comprehensive, equipping Harry with an appreciation for the engineering feat represented by the SpinDogs’ cylindrical asteroid, which had been cored out and converted into a difficult-to-detect space habitat. Each end of the station housed heavy equipment, docking bays, and power generation, leaving the multi-decked center section to house living quarters, light industrial work, hydroponics, and the like. This was the beating heart of the habitat. Even one such deck was several times larger than the biggest aircraft carrier ever built by his country, and yet the degree to which the SpinDogs maximized the productivity of every available cubic meter pushed home the point that their growth had outstripped their capacity. The addition of less than a hundred Terrans to a population of almost one hundred thousand was still a strain, more so because of Major Murphy’s insistence his team be housed together, isolated from the general population.
Of course, all of that followed a week of acclimatization to the new reality. The world Harry had known was beyond reach, and the new Earth was almost as unknowable. Current reports painted an Earth very different from the 1990s. Borders had been redrawn, and he barely recognized what passed for political parties. The newly woken soldiers were mostly American, but there were enough Poles, Afghanis, Vietnamese, and Russians to give their group an international feel. Of course, that diversity seemed modest once told there were at least five intelligent species in contact with humanity. The combat videos of the alien invasion of Earth revealed giant roach-like insects and bipedal anteater-werewolf hybrids. Bizarrely, negotiations were now underway to convert both of those alien races into allies while Earth entered a fight against the mostly human group which had kidnapped the Lost Soldiers out of their own time.
And of course, the worst reality of all: Harry couldn’t stop thinking about his irredeemable failure, the loss of his family. The number one thing he had finally sworn to do, to be present for Sara and the kids, was now forever beyond his reach.
The former SEAL heard the soft footsteps of a person approaching his makeshift workspace and a sudden, powerful wave of irritation surged, blanketing his self-pity. Every six hours, he had to pack his work into a plastic crate while the space was used for its original purpose. A glance at his venerable Casio G-Shock confirmed he should have plenty of time left. With an hour to go until the next meal, he expected to be left alone unless there was an emergency, and he hadn’t heard any of the alarms they’d memorized as the result of frequent drills.
“Harry, do you have a moment?” asked a now-familiar voice.
A glance over his shoulder confirmed his new boss, if that’s what he was, was approaching, an insulated stainless-steel mug in hand.
“No problem, sir,” Harry replied, smiling as genuinely as he could. He felt the anger rekindling itself in the wake of his initial irritation, and shoved it back down, hard. The guy in charge was entitled to interrupt whenever he felt like it, especially since he wasn’t here by choice, either. Harry twisted in his seat, lifting a stack of z-folded printouts, old-style notebooks, and a variety of maps from the bench across from him.
“I’ve told all of you to call me Rodger, or Roj, if you prefer,” Murphy replied with a smile as he slid onto the bench. “While we’re a military outfit, we’re all professionals, and I’m not enough of a little tin god to insist on unctuous military protocol.”
“Okay, Roj,” Harry replied, wrinkling his brow unconsciously.
“How goes your mission prep?”
“Well…”
“Let me guess,” Murphy re
plied, raising one hand. “You’re underwhelmed with your choice of teammates. You’re questioning the limitations on unit size. You keep asking yourself how this can possibly be the best option. Am I getting close?”
“Spot on,” Harry said, schooling his face into neutrality. “Look, you’re asking, right? This is actually a lot more complicated than the mission summary you gave me when I woke up. Let’s pretend our people are successful getting over the loss of their families and everything they knew. I won’t even mention the crap equipment we have to use. Let’s assume I accept the restrictions the fu—our hosts are imposing on us. Bottom line, damn near everything depends on planetside locals we haven’t yet met. And we’ll be operating across some pretty crappy terrain, almost entirely on foot, for the first several phases.”
Harry pushed aside more papers, this time on top of the table. He exposed a featureless, black-screened device he’d been given. He’d gotten over the vast differences from the IBM PC he’d last used in the 20th century and rapidly mastered the finger movements needed to control the legal document-sized, touch-operated screen.
“Here’s what I mean.”
A touch from a single thick finger illuminated the screen to reveal a grid of multicolored icons. He tapped a symbol shaped like a simplified, yet old-fashioned Mercator map projection. The planetary surface which blinked into existence showed the familiar swirl of clouds and blue ocean that might have been mistaken for Earth at a casual glance. However, there were only three main continents, two of which covered the poles. The equatorial region was mostly large islands, and those showed the light browns and sandy yellow colors of the deep desert. Harry used two fingers to orient the map on a point north of the equator, and then zoomed the view. He turned the datapad on its built-in stand so they both could see an area which included a mix of terrain ranging from grassy plains to rocky, channeled hills to outright desert.
“We insert via a high-risk orbital drop and land up to fifty klicks from the objective in order to avoid detection by the Kulsians, who have an established intelligence network, including aerial patrols.” As Harry talked, he couldn’t avoid thinking about how absurd the situation was, even as he pointed to each feature on the map. “After a long foot infil, I link up with tribes the SpinDogs think will be receptive to our plan. Once we’ve found the right bunch, I get to convince them, however I’m going to manage it, that they should work with us and allow me to train them. After which our merry band of hunter-gatherers plus yours truly perform local ops in order to gather more tribes to our forces. Then—and we still haven’t reached the good part—our combined force preps for an assault landing with one—that’s one—shuttle to deliver the rest of the Lost Soldiers and we seize a modern mechanized column intact using nothing but infantry. If I’m anything but perfectly successful, I’m stuck on a planet where the opposition is entrenched and more than a bit pissed that unknown forces—which would be me—have killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of their people and sparked an insurgency. To top it off, the planet is turning into a goddamn oven in two years, inhabitable nowhere but at the poles—which are thousands of klicks from where I’m going to land. Forlorn hope—hell—it would be simpler and kinder to just eat a goddamned bullet!”
Murphy's Lawless: A Terran Republic Novel Page 12